This site went live in October 2010 to flesh out technology and legality of CYBER PRIVATEERING as I wrote DADDY'S LITTLE FELONS. The novel pays homage to my old friend Judge Pat Brian, who died of pancreatic cancer on June 28, 2010.To get updates as new articles are posted, enter your email below:

To get notices of new blogs via email, click here:

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Last week (see story here), Huawei spokesman Scott Sykes said that proof that they were a spy conduit would be "corporate suicide." Interesting analogy. If my presentation for Black Hat 2014 is accepted, you could well be paying for your own hit man. $1,000,000. I guess if you pay your own hit man, that qualifies as suicide, doesn't it? In my best imitation of Godfatherspeak: "Yo Vinnie, deese guys should ought'ta prepare for a dirt nap."

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Yesterday's New York Times story (read it here) on White House "thinking" regarding cyber security is absolute proof that privatization is the only workable solution. The net-net seems to be that we can't count on the people protecting our infrastructure to let us know of vulnerabilities and back doors, because those flaws would then be fixed and unavailable to our own spooks:

But [Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator] spent the rest of his blog entry describing what conditions might lead to a decision not to publish the details of a flaw — perhaps for a short time, perhaps for much longer. “Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks,” Mr. Daniel wrote, describing the review that has taken place at the White House in the past few months.

This was basically a scam where I was getting both email and text messages from the scammers. I called the local FBI office to see if they wanted to sting these guys, and they declined. The FBI is far too busy to investigate these things. They suggested I send a report to IC3.GOV, which I did. I then called INTERPOL and got an even less enthusiastic answer. Even the local police were uninterested, although they did give me a case number for my police report (2014002363). One thing is certain: If the email and texts had been about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States, you can be sure the Secret Service would have perp-walked the shackled miscreants out of their homes within 24 hours!

What was NOT covered in the story was my suggestion that viewers text messages to the scammers (hopefully from "burner" phones) with a message like, "The Revolutionary Council has approved your beautiful plan to assassinate POTUS. Destroy your cell phone and go radio silent. God be with you." But interestingly enough, even though they didn't have time to air this part of my plan, the clever reporter did manage to include the scammer's US-based burner cell phone in the story (I added both the UK and US numbers to the video above). Since I have proposals to speak at several upcoming 2014 events, I even fantasized about buying a bunch of burner cell phones with prepaid text minutes and giving them to audience members. My invitation to the burner recipients would have been to send a "We approve your plan to kill the president…" message to the first scammer dumb enough to text them, and then toss the free phone into the bushes outside the house of a white supremacist. Of course, I plagiarized from my novel Daddy's Little Felons, so you might say I had this in my planned bag of tricks all along. Excerpting from my novel:

I launched a pre-emptive peer-to-peer command that sent an email in perfect Arabic to his entire address book using quotes from Surahs number 4 and 7 in the Koran as proof that Mohammed was a Satan worshiper and romantically inclined toward swine…My software then erased any trace of itself on his system, after first verifying that the mail had been sent, spectacularly destroying his operating system, and finally displaying the image of a pig on his screen.

This trick really upped my game, even exceeding the nasty I unleashed on an Internet scammer who was using a burner cell phone to swindle an elderly friend of mine. Rather than go to the trouble of tracking down the scammer, I just sent him a text message from my own untraceable burner. It read: “The Revolutionary Council has approved your excellent plan to kill POTUS. Radio silence from now on. God be with you.” Within twenty-four hours—thanks to the NSA snooping apparatus—the Secret Service descended on the poor devil who, as it turned out, lived just two doors down from my dear friend. Our last vision of him was his being perp-walked in shackles to a SWAT van, followed by agents hauling his computers and file cabinets. Naturally, I immediately disposed of my burner. Chances are, my Internet scammer had a much easier time explaining the text message about assassinating the president (POTUS) to the Secret Service than my Saudi hacker would have justifying his rash email.

But no, above isn't my "modest proposal."

My Modest Proposal

I understand that the FBI and Homeland Security can't possibly investigate all the scams and frauds being perpetrated by international crooks. But why not randomly identify an in-process fraud scheme and marshal the resources (FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, and INTERPOL) to publicly take down the culprits. You're got to believe that this would put a check in the swing of bad guys worldwide.

Can't we FOR ONCE go on the offensive and quit our defense-only mentality dictated by US Cyberlaw? This notion is humbly submitted by a mere pawn in the international game of cybercrookery.

Oh, and by the way. If you want to have some fun with the cyber scammer, here are their (probably burner) cell phone numbers:

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

This afternoon's Wall Street Journal story (read it here—"SEC Has 'A Number' of Investigations Into High-Frequency Trading") is absolute proof that government is woefully unequipped to regulate our technological society, and that new non-governmental mechanisms are required. Do high-frequency trading firms have an unfair advantage. The morons at the SEC are years too late! Back in 2007, I created this ad for EDGAROnline, pointing out that hedge funds paid 50-times more for data from EDGAROnline that regular customers, just so they could get it faster. Well duh! Did they have an unfair advantage. Yes. Were they trying to keep it a secret. Nope!

This message was brought to you by

Morgan Rapier's common-sense doctrine.

And even if the SEC somehow figures out a way to rein in information supply, there ain't no way they're going to put the analytics cork back in the bottle. At least one hedge fund (that I know of) is using analytics on Twitter posts and they're beating the market by a long shot.

I'm getting more and more scam email from Gmail subscribers. Inasmuch as Google seems to take security much more seriously than do Hotmail or Yahoo, it seems you could do the following:

Identify about 1000 trusted and VERIFIED Google/Gmail/Plus subscribers and set them up with a dashboard to report/catalogue spam/phishing/etc. operations that use Gmail return addresses.

When at least two of your "1000 Warriors" report the same spammer/scammer, immediately disable that account.

Just this week, I've gotten scam/spam from the following Gmail addresses:

John Keen – jkeen3000@gmail.com

Adam Kevin – adamkevin1982@gmail.com

Jane Clarke – janeclarke1982@gmail.com

Elias Montoya — eliasmmot@gmail.com

Interestingly, I found the first three reported by various other Google users when I…er…Googled them (I was trying to sell my baby grand piano, and the first three are piano scamming specialists). So, since Google is the fountain of all knowledge on the planet (no, I'm not being sarcastic), why not be a leader in helping enforce a healthy "reputation-based" economy?And my gift to you: www.ScamTripwire.com is available!Selah.

Search This Blog

Daddy's Little Felons, an ebook with cyberwar hyperlinks for only $2.99 from Amazon

Mitch Rapp and Jack Reacher, meet Morgan Rapier! He starts, wages, and wins a world-wide cyberwar. He also solves several murders, becomes the #1 U.S. Navy SEAL recruiter, and gets his Islamic school chum into a whole lot of trouble. All in one week! Dedicated to my late friend, district court judge Pat Brian.

DESTROYING ANGEL, an ebook with hyperlinks for only $2.99 at Amazon

Meet the real…Destroying Angel.

Background: Welcome black hats, white hats and cyber swashbucklers

The Revolutionary War was fought, financed, and pretty well WON by bonded privateers, legalized pirates who were given Letters of Marque and Reprisal by the Continental Congress and authorized to attack, capture and monetize British ships. The purpose of this site is to explore the possibility of a modern-day doctrine much like the Monroe Doctrine, by means of which the U.S. government could legally and, more importantly, effectively stop international hackers. Current cybercrime law is not only ineffective, but downright stupid. My Linux servers are attacked hundreds of times a day (mostly from China and former USSR domains), yet if I retaliate against those servers with some creative technology at my disposal (I know some VERY smart guys), then I am in violation of federal law and subject to some onerous penalties. We need more than a new law. We need a new international doctrine. I call it The Morgan Doctrine, named after Morgan Rapier, a fictional character I've created (hey, this is my way of establishing ownership of the concept, should it ever see the light of day).

Why a new international doctrine? Simply, nothing else will work. Introduced on December 2, 1823, the Monroe Doctrine told the world to keep their hands off the Americas. Combine this with current legal thinking on "hot pursuit" of fugitives. In 1917 the US Army went into Mexico after Pancho Villa. More recently, in 1960 Israeli Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. Granted, much of the world regards the Eichmann adventure as a violation of international law. I don't share that opinion and therefore use it as the third leg of my Monroe-Pancho-Aldof platform for The Morgan Doctrine.

If someone comes into your home and attacks or attempts to rob you, you may shoot them dead. You may do so as long as they expire on your property. But what about cyber criminals? They attack you in your home from their homes. Retaliate in kind, and you go to jail. The Morgan Doctrine states simply that if you attack my computers (or my banking assets held in US-based computers), then under a certain set of well-defined conditions, a licensed and bonded "cyber privateer" may attack you in your home country and split the proceeds with the U.S. government. For the sake of argument, let's call it a 50-50 split (heh heh).

Right now, American law enforcement is completely unequipped to deal with the sheer number international cyber hackers. Sure, I could report each of the thousand daily attacks to the FBI, as could the millions of other attackees in the USA. But the volume of such reports would make any meaningful resolution laughable. Not to mention that the FBI has no jurisdiction outside the USA. Yet to make such "enforcement" profitable to recognized (ie, "bonded" "deputized") privateers, as Heath Ledger's Joker said in his last role, "Now you're talking!" You raid our bank accounts, we raid yours. You make money from off-shore child pornography, we're going to loot your bank accounts and, with some REALLY creative black hat operations, you will be taken off the grid worldwide to the extent that you'll not even complete a cell phone conversation for the remainder of your miserable depraved life. Okay, that last part probably won't fly, but you get my drift.

The purpose of this site is to explore the mechanics, legalities and practicality of The Morgan Doctrine.

And I will be the sole arbiter of whether or not your comments get posted. As Mel Brooks wrote, "It's good to be king."